Microsoft Says Windows 10 Is Now Running On Over 200 Million Devices

0

Microsoft this morning announced promising numbers related to the growth and traction of its Windows 10 operating system. The company confirmed today that Windows 10 is now running on over 200 million monthly active devices worldwide, and is also the fastest-growing release of any version of the Windows operating system ever.

In addition, it appears that Microsoft benefited from Black Friday sales this year, noting that a remarkable 40 percent-plus of new Windows 10 devices became active since Black Friday. Since that sales holiday, U.S. retail share for Windows 10 grew by 16 points to reach 62 percent compared to the prior four weeks. And the Windows 10 mix of PCs rose to 87 percent from 58 percent before the holiday.

Also growing is demand for the OS in the enterprise, with the company claiming that more than 76 percent of enterprise customers are actively piloting Windows 10 and more than 22 million devices are being run by enterprise and education customers.

As Business Insider pointed out, the 200 million devices number had been previously reported by independent third parties, like Statistica, but had yet to be publicly confirmed by Microsoft.

Along with these figures, Microsoft also detailed PC users’ engagement with the OS, noting that it hit another milestone in December when users spent over 11 billion hours during the month on the Windows 10 OS. That’s more time than ever before, the company said.

The company detailed a few other notable numbers:

Over 44.5 billion minutes were spent in Microsoft Edge across Windows 10 devices in the last month.

In 2015, gamers spent over 4 billion hours playing PC games on Windows 10.

Gamers have streamed more than 6.6 million hours of Xbox One games to Windows 10 PCs.

The new Windows Store has seen 3 billion visits. and 2x increase in the number of paid transactions.

60 percent of paying customers were new to the Windows Store in December, and Windows 10 generated more than 4.5x increase in revenue per device, compared with Windows 8.

Of course, a large factor at play with regard to today’s numbers is the fact that Microsoft’s Windows 10 was a free upgrade – a change in the company’s strategy from years past. Microsoft is also combining Windows 10 PCs and mobile devices to come up with its Windows 10 figures.

The company reiterated its goal of seeing Windows 10 installed on over 1 billion devices – something it previously said could happen in two or three years.

While touting Windows 10’s success was the larger focus of today’s announcement, Microsoft also shared some numbers related to Surface Book and Xbox.

It said that 2015 was the biggest year in Xbox history, but didn’t share figures related to how many units were sold. Instead, Microsoft said the Xbox One set a record for global sales and engagement, and that more users signed into Xbox Live on December 28 than any other day ever.

Related Articles

Microsoft’s Surface Book also didn’t get detailed figures, but will become available outside the U.S., Canada, China and Hong Kong. Starting tomorrow, Surface Book will be available to order in several new markets, including Austria, Australia, UK, France, Germany, Switzerland and New Zealand. It will later come to Japan and India.

Microsoft also claimed that demand for its Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL is outstripping supply, which may not be an indication of consumer interest but rather an indicator that there weren’t that many devices initially available.